Regulating oxygen activity of perovskites to promote NO x oxidation and reduction kinetics

Understanding the adsorption and oxidation of NO on metal oxides is of immense interest to environmental and atmospheric (bio)chemistry. Here, we show that the surface oxygen activity, defined as the oxygen 2 p -band centre relative to the Fermi level, dictates the adsorption and surface coverage of NO x and the kinetics of NO oxidation for La 1− x Sr x CoO 3 perovskites. Density functional theory and ambient-pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy revealed favourable NO adsorption on surface oxygen sites. Increasing the surface oxygen activity by increasing the strontium substitution led to stronger adsorption and greater storage of NO 2 , which resulted in more adsorbed nitrogen-like species and molecular nitrogen formed upon exposure to CO. The NO oxidation kinetics exhibited a volcano trend with surface oxygen activity, centred at La 0.8 Sr 0.2 CoO 3 and with an intrinsic activity comparable to state-of-the-art catalysts. We rationalize the volcano trend by showing that increasing the NO adsorption enhances the oxidation kinetics, although NO adsorption that is too strong poisons the surface oxygen sites with adsorbed NO 2 to impede the kinetics.